CENTER FOR A SMART FUTURE

KNOWLEDGE INSIGHTS

SEPTEMBER 15, 2024
Reclaiming Public Space: Who Is It For and Who Is Welcome?
In July 2024, the Colombo Urban Lab team embarked on a series of exploratory sessions in Colombo to reflect on public spaces in the city. Starting at Independence Square, we took routes that went through major public spaces that we recognised as being synonymous with many people’s lives in Colombo. From Viharamahadevi Park to Race Course Mall, we looked at the purpose of each of these public spaces, and how they are used today. These are some of our reflections on what we felt, saw, and heard.
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JUNE 18, 2024
Falling Through The Cracks: The Impact of Sri Lanka’s Economic Crisis on Colombo’s Working Class Poor
Colombo Urban Lab’s fourth policy brief on the impact of Sri Lanka’s economic crisis on the city's working class poor communities focusses on energy, education and health. These findings are from our ongoing qualitative research with communities in Colombo as well as a household survey conducted in April 2024 with thirty households in a settlement in North Colombo.
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JUNE 7, 2024
Methodology for Mapping Urban Food Environments
Mapping food vendors is an important method to capture availability, accessibility and diversity of food environments. This report details the methodology used to map food vendors in urban sites and explores the reasons behind the development of this methodology. It provides practical insights into the implementation of field-based vendor mapping, discussing both the challenges encountered and the lessons learned.
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MAY 3, 2024
Settlements in Colombo: Sustainability of neighbourhoods
This infographic provides an overview of the sustainability of neighbourhoods in Colombo. A total of 1,360 settlements in the Colombo Municipality were surveyed in 2023, using 27 indicators for physical infrastructure, tenure and socio-economic conditions, to assess sustainability of neighbourhoods. The findings showed that settlements cannot be characterised as underserved settlements as they have adequate infrastructure provisioning.
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APRIL 15, 2024
Communicating Crisis
On the 7th of March 2024, Centre for a Smart Future and Colombo Urban Lab hosted an event called, “Communicating Crisis”. The event featured a panel discussion on Sri Lanka’s path to a just recovery, anchored to key questions. How do economic indicators compare with people’s lived experiences? How can civil society and the media amplify voices from the ground?
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MARCH 29, 2024
Behind the scenes: Colombo Settlements Survey 2023
While data and numbers offer helpful insights, the picture it paints is almost always incomplete without an understanding of how those numbers were arrived at—how data is collected, and the sensitivities that enumerators need to be mindful of when conducting large scale surveys. Understanding the methodology of conducting such surveys add an important realistic dimension to policies that are solely data-driven.
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MARCH 27, 2024
Does Colombo have sprawling slums and shanties?
This infographic provides an overview of settlements in the City of Colombo. The map shows the distribution of settlements in Colombo, with the most number of settlements concentrated in Colombo North. The data shows that most settlements have upgraded on-site, and that compared to other cities in the Global South, Colombo’s settlements are smaller and fragmented, with no trend of sprawling slums and shanties to be found.
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MARCH 26, 2024
Are Colombo’s working class poor really ‘underserved’?
How we talk about the urban poor is situated in a broader context of urban development and competing ideas of what Colombo should and will look like, and such words sanction the exclusion of the urban poor from the city.  It is crucial that our terminology reflects the complexity of ground level realities, particularly when Sri Lanka’s difference is erased and subsumed by other South Asian narratives. 
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MARCH 13, 2024
Colombo Settlements Survey 2023
SEVANATHA and Colombo Urban Lab is pleased to announce the launch of the Colombo Settlements Survey Report for the year 2023, in collaboration with the Colombo Municipal Council. The report provides the latest data on all 1360 urban settlements in the City of Colombo, with key findings and recommendations. The Colombo Settlements Survey is the third iteration of the Survey, which was previously conducted in 2002 and 2012 by SEVANATHA in collaboration with the Colombo Municipal Council. The survey collects data on key indicators including tenure, access to basic services and level of housing development as well as on the socio-economic aspects of the settlements.
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FEBRUARY 11, 2024
Quantifying poverty: Can we truly capture its complexity?
Developing an operational definition for household poverty requires the consideration of two aspects. Firstly, it needs to identify an indicative property or combination of such properties which are generalisable across all households facing poverty (within the population of interest), and secondly, it needs to explain how they would be empirically measured and the degree of poverty calculated. According to the discourse on the limitations of both Samurdhi and Aswesuma, this article highlights how these aspects need to negotiate the complexities of at least three conflicting cues (a triple bind). 
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JANUARY 22, 2024
A research methodology to understand stories of development and displacement in two of Colombo’s markets
In the bid to build a world class city, many of Colombo’s working class poor found themselves being displaced- displaced from both places of residence and places of business, as they did not align with Colombo’s evolving identity. This article presents a methodology, following an ethnographic approach to understanding development and the problems associated with it for those whose views are seldom included in the new city identity.
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SEPTEMBER 26, 2023
Anchoring meaningful community participation at the heart of nature-based solutions in cities
Nature-based solutions (NbS) aim to repair, sustain, and protect ecosystems while addressing societal challenges. They include biodiversity conservation, erosion control, wetland reforestation, climate change mitigation, food and water security, among others.
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